Bitter Clingers Again: The bigotry behind the push for gun control

It’s strikingly reminiscent of Barack Obama’s notorious 2008 musings on “some of these small towns in Pennsylvania and . . . the Midwest”: “It’s not surprising . . . that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”

Like Clinton on Saturday, Obama thought he was speaking privately to a group of well-heeled donors, but it turned out a journalist was present. It’s possible that, like Obama in 2008, Clinton is insufficiently self-aware to recognize his own condescension. Or perhaps he’s being mischievous and trying to undermine Obama’s gun-control efforts. Either way, it’s not as if he has anything to lose.

An even sharper display of urban leftist bigotry against gun owners comes in a pair of posts by Josh Marshall, proprietor of TalkingPointsMemo.com. In the first, titled “Speaking for My Tribe,” Marshall divides the world into two “tribes,” which he calls “gun people” and “non-gun people.”